Time in International Organizations and International Organizations in Time

Author(s):  
Eugénia C. Heldt

Time plays a central role in international organizations (IOs). Interactions among actors are embedded in a temporal dimension, and actors use formal and informal time rules, time discourses, and time pressure to obtain concessions from their counterparts. By the same token, legacies and innovations within and outside IOs can be examined as a dynamic process evolving over time. Against this background, this chapter has a twofold aim. First, it examines how actors use time in IOs with a particular focus on multilateral negotiations to justify their actions. Drawing on international relations studies and negotiation analysis, this piece explores six different dimensions of time in the multilateral system: time pressure, time discourse, time rules, time costs, time horizons, and time as a resource. Second, this chapter delineates the evolution of IOs over time with the focus on innovations that emerge to adapt their institutional system to new political and economic circumstances. This piece looks particularly at endogenous and exogenous changes in IOs, recurring to central concepts used by historical institutionalism, including path dependence, critical junctures, and sequencing. This allows us to map patterns of incremental change, such as displacement, conversion, drift, and layering.

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Gülay Icoz ◽  
Natalie Martin

AbstractThis chapter employs the perspective of historical institutionalism to analyze and explain why Turkey’s EU accession process endures even though it has not significantly progressed since it began. It argues that its temporal approach, the concepts of critical junctures and path dependence help explain the processes of stasis and change inherent within it. The chapter starts with an outline of historical institutionalism and contextualizes its conceptual and theoretical value for the analysis of EU–Turkey relations, arguing that an underlying path dependence in the accession process is the result of security considerations. The chapter continues by identifying several critical junctures which have intervened, and both expedited and hampered the process. The opposition of member states, the Arab Spring, and authoritarian drift within Turkey are important factors in this context. On this basis, the analysis shows how progress achieved has typically been countered by opposition, often related to human rights concerns. As a result, the accession process has stagnated but has endured at the same time as security interests and human rights concerns have balanced each other over time.


Urban Studies ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Sorensen

Property rights in land are often regarded as among the most inflexible of the institutional structures that shape urban change, particularly when enshrined in a written constitution. This paper argues that the meaning and specification of property rights in the city are continually contested and in flux and that the evolving practice of city planning is a significant element that contributes to change. A better understanding of the mechanisms of such change is valuable for our understanding both of city planning and of property rights. A historical institutionalist analysis suggests that property rights display significant elements of path dependence, yet also show characteristic patterns and processes of incremental change over time. This analysis of evolving systems to regulate permissible development in Japanese cities during the period since the environmental crisis of the 1960s is revealing of the structured ways in which property rights are contested and change over time.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3099
Author(s):  
V. Javier Traver ◽  
Judith Zorío ◽  
Luis A. Leiva

Temporal salience considers how visual attention varies over time. Although visual salience has been widely studied from a spatial perspective, its temporal dimension has been mostly ignored, despite arguably being of utmost importance to understand the temporal evolution of attention on dynamic contents. To address this gap, we proposed Glimpse, a novel measure to compute temporal salience based on the observer-spatio-temporal consistency of raw gaze data. The measure is conceptually simple, training free, and provides a semantically meaningful quantification of visual attention over time. As an extension, we explored scoring algorithms to estimate temporal salience from spatial salience maps predicted with existing computational models. However, these approaches generally fall short when compared with our proposed gaze-based measure. Glimpse could serve as the basis for several downstream tasks such as segmentation or summarization of videos. Glimpse’s software and data are publicly available.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torsten Kahlert

AbstractThis article investigates interwar internationalism from the perspective of the highest personnel of the first large-scale international administration, the League of Nations Secretariat. It applies a prosopographical approach in order to map out the development of the composition of the group of the section directors of the Secretariat over time in terms of its social and cultural characteristics and career trajectories. The analysis of gender, age, nationality, as well as educational and professional backgrounds and careers after their service for the League’s Secretariat gives insight on how this group changed over time and what it tells us about interwar internationalism. I have three key findings to offer in this article: First, the Secretariat was far from being a static organization. On the contrary, the Secretariat’s directors developed in three generations each with distinct characteristics. Second, my analysis demonstrates a clear trend towards professionalization and growing maturity of the administration over time. Third, the careers of the directors show a clear pattern of continuity across the Second World War and beyond. Even though the careers continued in different organizational contexts, the majority of the directors remained closely connected to the world of internationalism of the League, the UN world and its surrounding organizations. On a methodological level, the article offers an example of how prosopographical analysis can be used to study international organizations.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Scott ◽  
Mathew Hughes ◽  
Domingo Ribeiro-Soriano

AbstractWe conceptualize entrepreneurial ecosystems as fundamentally reliant on networks and explore how and under what conditions inter-organizational networks lead an entrepreneurial ecosystem to form and evolve. It is widely accepted that entrepreneurial ecosystems possess a variety of symbiotic relationships. Research has focused considerable efforts in refining the structure and content of resources found within these networked relationships. However, merely focusing on actor-level characterizations dilutes the notion that social relationships change and are complex. There has been little conceptual treatment of the behavioral and governance factors that underpin how quality interactions composing an entrepreneurial ecosystem develop and change over time. In response, we provide a longitudinal ethnographic study examining how ecosystems are managed and evolve in their relational configurations and governance at critical junctures. Using mixed methods and data collected over 3 years, we reveal a cyclical process of relational development central to the initiation, development, and maintenance phases of a valuable entrepreneurial ecosystem. We contribute to a conceptualization of effective ecosystems as reliant on networks, we reveal the behavior and governance characteristics at play in the entrepreneurial ecosystem during each phase of its evolution.


1992 ◽  
Vol 49 (S1) ◽  
pp. 33-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Roger Pitblado

Multivariate statistical procedures are used to establish empirical associations between acidity, visual lake water colour, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations, and Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) radiance data. Acidic lakes in an area northeast of Sudbury (Canada) are characterized by their clear, blue colours and very low DOC. With a subjective, three-class water colour grouping, 92% of the study lakes were correctly classified using TM data. Further, it is shown that DOC, the major component of water colour in this area, can be predicted within 1 mg/L of observed concentrations using TM data (multiple r = 0.93, P < 0.01). By deriving interrelationships between pH levels, water colour, and DOC, Landsat data provide a means to discriminate and map the acidic and nonacidic lakes of the study area. Examination of the reflectance characteristics of a single acidic lake (Bowland Lake) that has undergone neutralization suggests that Landsat data may be used to detect optical changes over time. However, the capability for monitoring the temporal dimension of lake acidification using satellite data has yet to be established.


Author(s):  
Michelle Hegmon

Path dependence concepts, thus far, have seen little application in archaeology, but they have great potential. At a general level, these concepts provide tools for theorizing historical sequences, such as patterns of settlement on a landscape and divergent historical traditions. Potential applications include issues of historical contingency in the late Rio Grande, settlement in the Mesa Verde region, and divergent trajectories in the post-Chaco period. Specific concepts from path dependence theory, including lock-in and critical junctures, are illustrated by an analysis of the growth of Hohokam irrigation, which exhibited a path-dependent trajectory. As archaeological study of path dependence builds awareness of the importance of decision-making on the future, it contributes to difficult decision-making in today’s world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 127-161
Author(s):  
Dennis Niemann

AbstractIn Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-78885-8_5, Dennis Niemann analyzes international organizations (IOs) and their education ideas. Different ideological paradigms dominated the global education discourse at different periods. Fundamentally, they revolve around two poles of an economic utilitarian view on education and on an interpretation that emphasizes the social and cultural value of education. Both leitmotifs were influenced by general developments in world politics, and they were also reflected within IOs. Niemann analyzes how global education IOs, specifically the World Bank, the OECD, UNESCO, and the ILO, influenced the global discourse on education. First, he argues that within the IOs, the antipodal views on education became more complementary over time. Second, he demonstrates the pattern of interaction between the IOs has also changed from competition to cooperation.


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